"This book frames the evolutionary path of medicine and provides a useful forecasting model. Tracing health spending from ancient times to the present with a single ratio, health expenditures as a share of income, reveals an s-shaped growth curve, rising rapidly after science made therapies more...

"Health Economics and Financing is a primer for the economic analysis of medical markets. Its intended audiences are students of medicine, public health, policy, and administration who wish to engage the central economic issues of their field without prolonged preparatory work; beginning...

Quantifying the growth of medical expenditures over decades or centuries is challenging. Attempting to do so reveals a number of inconsistencies, ambiguities and other measurement issues. The problems are both practical and conceptual. This article discusses national accounting frameworks,...

Section I of this chapter briefly reviews the literature on medical spending, which suggests that health expenditures began small but steadily increased throughout history (from 1 percent to 4 percent of GDP), then began to increase rapidly among wealthier developed countries after 1950. Section...